Saturday, 14 June 2014

In the Buddhist context Nirvana or moksha, is described as the extinguishing of the fires that cause suffering. These fires are typically identified as the fires of attachment (raga), aversion (dvesha) and ignorance (moha or avidya). When the fires are extinguished, suffering (dukkha) comes to an end. The cessation of suffering is described as complete peace. Thus nirvana refers to the imperturbable stillness of mind after the fires of desire, aversion, and delusion have been finally extinguished.
In Hindu philosophy, it is the union with the divine ground of existence Brahman (Supreme Being) and the experience of blissful egolessness.

Alan Wilson Watts (1915-973) was a British-born philosopher, writer, and speaker, best known as an interpreter and populariser of Eastern philosophy for a Western audience. Watts's fascination with the Zen developed because that tradition embodied the spiritual, interwoven with the practical, as exemplified in the subtitle of his Spirit of Zen: A Way of Life, Work, and Art in the Far East. "Work," "life," and "art" were not demoted due to a spiritual focus.
Watts equated mystical experience with ecological awareness, and typically emphasized whichever approach seemed best suited to the audience he was addressing.

Watts felt that absolute morality had nothing to do with the fundamental realization of one's deep spiritual identity. He advocated social rather than personal ethics. In his writings, Watts was increasingly concerned with ethics applied to relations between humanity and the natural environment and between governments and citizens.

In several of his later publications, especially Beyond Theology and The Book on the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are, Watts put forward a worldview, drawing on Hinduism, Chinese philosophy, panentheism, and modern science, in which he maintains that the whole universe consists of a cosmic self playing hide-and-seek (Lila), hiding from itself (Maya) by becoming all the living and non-living things in the universe, forgetting what it really is; the upshot being that we are all IT in disguise. In this worldview, Watts asserts that our conception of ourselves as an "ego in a bag of skin" is a myth; the entities we call the separate "things" are merely processes of the whole.

Watts also argues that Eastern philosophy and religion are not
necessarily spiritual and world denying. For instance, the non-dualistic
interpretation of Vedanta (the philosophy of the Upanishads) implies a
kind of pantheism. The divine is identical with the material universe
and with each individual being. The goal of religion is the mystical
experience of our oneness with the divine/cosmos. This experience may
require asceticism and contemplation. But it can just as well be
spontaneous and effortless. It can hit you in the marketplace, on the
battlefield, or in your turnip patch.
Mahayana Buddhism, moreover, stresses the unity of samsara and nirvana.
Nirvana is not blissful annihilation, but a change of attitude in this
life that allows freedom and detachment in the whirl and rush of
material existence.

Watts had no patience with what he called “the aching legs school of
Buddhism”, whose practicioners were prideful of their long, silent
sittings. When the legs start to ache, he would say slyly, I prefer to
get up and dance.

Some have commented that Watts concern to clear away philosophical hubris over spiritual existence negated as valueless any concern for environmental destruction at the hands of mankind.By contrast with these views, Watts dialogue and books show how the illusion of the ego is linked with environmental destruction - in essence then if we orient our 'selves' rightly, that this will include caring for the Earth and co citizen species correctly.

“As a result of having a false sense of identity, we act in a way that is inappropriate to our environment, and when that inappropriate action is magnified by a very powerful technology, we swiftly begin to see the results of a profound discord between man and nature. As is well-known, we are now in the process of destroying our environment…

It should be obvious however that the human being goes with the rest of the universe, even though we say in popular speech ‘I came into this world’. Now it is not true that you came into this world. You came out of it, in the same way as a flower comes out of a plant or a fruit comes out of a tree. And as an apple tree ‘apples’, the solar system in which we live, and therefore the galaxy in which we live, and therefore the system of galaxies in which we live, that system ‘peoples’. If people are intelligent – and I suppose we have to grant that ‘if’ – the energy which people express must also be intelligent, because one does not gather figs from thistles or grapes from thorns.

But it does not occur to the ordinary person to regard himself or herself as an expression of the whole universe. It should be obvious that we cannot exist except in an environment of air, earth, water and solar temperature, that all these things go with us and are as important to us as our internal organs such as our heart, brain, stomach and so forth.”

“Man as an organism is to the world outside like a whirlpool is to a
river: man and world are a single natural process, but we are behaving
as if we were invaders and plunderers in a foreign territory.”Dissarming the pseudo philosophical and religious intellectual nerosis of word play and mind games that may sound sensible but are actually meaningless, Watts empowers the receptive among us to freedom from endless obfuscation. In so doing, Watts provides a clear outline for the notion of thinking globally and taking action at a personal level, locally - in ones very orientation to life and the world around us.

Whilst Watts discouraged the chasing of philosophical devils because as he saw it the excercise is fundamentally futile, in terms of protecting the environment, I would say that he was one of its key facilitators.

Watts provided a holisitc 'eco-spiritual framework' which enabled many to understand our place in life, an explanation of how the environment and human existence are not seperate items, but coexistant expressions of the infinite and incomprehensible cosmos.

To destroy our own home, the life support system of our environment - is not simply to rob 'our world' of its is incomparable beauty, rather that it is to destroy our very selves.

Some of my favourite Watts' quotes

“The special branch of science which studies the relation of living
beings to their environments – ecology – shows beyond doubt that the
individual organism and its environment are a continuous stream, or
field, of energy. To draw a new moral from the bees and the flowers: the
two organisms are very different, for one is rooted in the ground and
broadcasts perfume, while the other moves freely in the air and buzzes.
But because they cannot exist without each other, it makes real sense to
say that they are in fact two aspects of a single organism. Our heads
are very different in appearance from our feet, but we recognize them as
belonging to one individual because they are obviously connected by
skin and bones. But less obvious connections are no less real…”

Civilized human beings are alarmingly ignorant of the fact that they are continuous with
their natural surroundings. It is as necessary to have air, water,
plants, insects, birds, fish, and mammals as it is to have brains,
hearts, lungs, and stomachs. The former are our external organs in the
same way that the latter are our internal organs. (…) The sun, the
earth, and the forests are just as much features of your own body as
your brain. Erosion of the soil is as much a personal disease as
leprosy, and many ‘growing communities’ are as disastrous as cancer.
That we do not feel this to be obvious is the result of centuries of
habituation to the idea that oneself is only the envelope of skin and
its contents, the inside but not the outside. The extreme folly of this
notion becomes clear as soon as you try to imagine an inside with no
outside, or an outside with no inside.”

“Civilization, as we have worked it out,
is a system of screens which conceal the connections between events. (…)
Bacon, as found packaged in the supermarket, gives no intimation of
pig, and steaks appear as if they were entities like apples, having no
relation to the slicing of dead cattle. To remove such screens is held
to be as offensive and vulgar as to relieve one’s bowels in the gutter
of a public street.” Alan Watts; Does It Matter? Essays on Man’s Relation to Materiality.

“We do not "come into" this world; we come out of it, as leaves from a tree.”

Sunday, 1 June 2014

Gwydion (Goo-Eed-Yon), Caer Wydion the Celtic Bard born of the trees, at 'the Castle of Gwydion' which was the traditional Welsh name for the Milky Way ie under the Sky above ~Gwydion is a Celtic Bard, Sorcerer and Trickster of Welsh mythology, appearing most prominently in the Fourth Branch of the Mabinogi, the Welsh Triads and the 14th century
medieval Welsh book of poetry The Book of Taliesin by the Bard Taliesin, whose name means Radiant Brow.
Here we hear Gwydion recite a verse from the Cad Goddeu - the Battle of the Trees, found in the The Book of Taliesin which tells the story of a battle fought between Gwydion and Bran. Gwydion enchants the trees to fight as part of his army, which he is empowered to do as he is himself 'Born Of Trees' which is the meaning of his name.

In the section of the poem narrated here, Gwydion is declaring his
magical lineage and shared spiritual existence with the underlaying
forces below and beyond nature, he is a poetic shaman of the highest
order.

Before I assumed a consistent form,

I have been a sword,

Narrow variegated,

I will believe it when it appears.

I have been a door in the air,

I have been a shinning star,

I have been a word among letters,

I have been a book originally.

I have been the light of lanterns,

A year and a half.

I have been a course,

I have been an eagle,

I have been a corricle in the seas,

I have been compliant in the banquet,

I have been a drop in a shower,

I have been a sword in the grasp of a hand,

I have been a shield in battle,

I have been a string in a harp,

Disguissed for nine years in water -

In foam.

I have been sponge in the fire,

I have been wood, in the covert,

There is nothing in which I have not been.

Neither of mother or father, when I was made,

Was my blood or my body.

Nine formed faculties.,

Of the fruit of fruits, of fruit God made me,

Of primroses and blossoms,

Of thyme hill,

Of the flowers of trees and shrubs,

Of Earth, of an earthly course,

When I was formed.

Of the flower of nettles,

Of the water of the ninth wave.

I was enchanted by Math,

Before I became Immortal,

I know the star knowledge,

Of the stars before the Earth was made.

c. Taliesin from the Cad Goddeu.

On the Power Of Trees; Mytho Poetic Beings Rooted in the Here and Reaching Hereafter;
In many mythologies Trees are embued with far reaching powers that are infact commensurate with their actual influence over the nature and wildlife of their environs. The mythologies have explored these connections further than the mere material, as can be seen in the words for Oak and Door in Irish and Welsh being related (dair -- the
same word for both in Irish -- derwen and drws, and even English "door",
Norse dyrr and Greek thura), implying perhaps a view of the Oak as door
to the Otherworld. In addittion also consider the Norse World Tree Yggdrassil.

The original poem is fragmented and full of
riddles which has given rise to a wide range of interpretation and
speculation. Most famous of these is Robert Graves remarkable mytho-poetical study 'The White Goddess'.

On The Excellence of the Poetic Word; Druid Rhetoric and Shaman Transormations;
We see many details about Gwydion exisiting as diverse beings in this
poem, as shapechange itself is a well known device of Druids, Bards and
Shamen. Joan Halifax, in 'Shaman: the Wounded Healer' (1982), says: "To
the heavens, to the well at the end of the world, to the depths of the
Underworld, to the bottoms of spirit-filled lakes and seas, around the
earth, to the moon and sun, to distant stars and back again does the
shaman-bird travel. All the cosmos is accessible when the art of
transformation has been mastered." (p. 24)
Thus the Shamanic
technique of flight which encompassess many transformations is often
expressed, evoked and even facilitated via the Bardic power of the word,
the hypnotically chanted word, the alliterative or allegorical poem,
and the very wings of the song. As such, i'm sure that many will easily
recognise, tales, poems and songs do indeed hold a transformative power
over our individual awareness and ensuing spiritual essence, empowering
changed perceptions and consequently lives and worlds..

Of the Battle of the Trees itself;
The Battle of the Trees originated when Amaethon stole a dog, a lapwing, and a roebuck from Arawn, the god of the Underworld (called Annwn). Robert Graves, who speculated that Bran and Arawn were names for the same Underworld god, wrote that the battle was probably not meant as a physical one but rather a struggle of wits and scholarship. Gwydion's forces could only be defeated if the name of his companion, Lady Achren was guessed (her name meant "Trees"), and Arawn's host could only be defeated if Bran's name were guessed (which Gwydion did).
The trees who fought in the battle were also part of the Druidic alphabet known as Ogham, where each sound is represented by a pattern of notches and a particular tree. Each tree had a meaning and significance of its own, which was why Gwydion was able to win the battle: he guessed Bran's name by the Alder branch Bran was carrying--the alder being one of Bran's prime symbols.